


3 Secrets Q & Eve Keep from MI6 (and One They Let Slip)

by aurilly



Category: Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: F/M, Friends to Lovers, Male-Female Friendship, Roommates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-26
Updated: 2014-04-26
Packaged: 2018-01-19 22:43:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1486852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurilly/pseuds/aurilly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Living together, working together... Somewhere along the way, they missed a step.</p>
            </blockquote>





	3 Secrets Q & Eve Keep from MI6 (and One They Let Slip)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PhoenixFalls](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PhoenixFalls/gifts).



**Secret #1: Eve and Q live together**

“We’re out of HobNobs,” Q complains one morning when he reaches into the designated cabinet and feels nothing under his exploring fingers. “Both here _and_ at the office.”

Eve is checking her hair in the mirror on her way out. She needn’t bother. It’s perfect. It’s always perfect. “Then stop at the Tescos Express on your way home and get more,” she says absently.

“How? I haven’t seen daylight in, oh, three weeks.”

“And whose fault is that? You’re the Quartermaster. You run an entire department. If you wanted, you could enforce weekly outings into the daylight. Perhaps form a cricket team. MI5’s been trying to challenge us for years.” 

“This is a ploy to get me into white shorts, isn’t it?”

“I think you’d look charming.”

“Have a thing for knobby knees, have we?”

“Knobs in general.”

She’s out the door before he’s schooled his face to deliver a witty comeback.

This is a little game they play: plunging one another into a sea of dry speechlessness. She wins this round, breaking Q’s streak of victories.

He looks at the time and sets an alarm for fifteen minutes from now. He’s already checked and seen that the District line is frightfully delayed. If he leaves any sooner, more than likely they’ll find themselves on the same train. Arriving at the same time is something they try to avoid.

MI6 has eyes everywhere.

*

Q and Eve haven’t always lived together. For almost a year, ever since his mate from uni suddenly moved to Mombasa, leaving most of his things behind, this dark but high ceilinged loft was Q’s alone.

Eve used to live with an American girl who works as an industrial designer and smokes electronic cigarettes. Her name is Amanda and she keeps an entire pharmacy’s worth of beauty supplies in the bathroom.

Or so Eve says.

Q has never met this Amanda, but Eve assures him she’s lovely, despite her terrible taste in men.

“She’d be mad about you,” she has said with a smirk. “It’s in everyone’s best interest that the two of you never cross paths.”

He has only heard about this flat, because he didn’t even know Eve was in London until she moved in with him.

*

This is how it happened.

Sitting cross-legged in the center of the shag rug one afternoon, Q looked up to see the lock on the door turning of its own accord.

“Oh!” Eve said, entering the flat as though she owned the place, lock pick in hand. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

“I _live_ here!”

“It’s Wednesday. Haven’t you somewhere to be?” She paused to pull the four suitcases she had lined up in the hall inside the flat. “Last time I checked in on you, you were toiling away for some doomed start-up.”

“I’ve been sacked. So goes my bid for honest, gainful employment.”

Eve collapsed prettily into the couch, flopping her tote beside her. “What reasons did they give?”

“It was my attitude, they said.”

“Well, it’s a good thing I don’t mind your attitude, for you’re in luck. I’m here to pay your rent for you.”

“I beg your pardon?” Q shook the cobwebs and code out of his head. Whether working with words or weapons, Eve had always been good at disarming him, but this was taking it a bit far. He took a deep breath and began again—began where he should have the moment she entered the room. “Eve, what are you doing here? I haven’t seen you in years. Since when have you been in London?”

“A couple of months. I got a transfer from my old job in Rio.” She crossed her ankles together like a nervous little girl, and then uncrossed them when she got to the truth. “My mum’s taken ill. They checked her into a hospital around the corner from here yesterday.”

“I see,” Q said. He had never met her mum. He hardly knew anything real or quotidian about her at all. He didn’t know what to say, so he went with the plebeian, not at all clever response. “I’m sorry.”

But Eve had never had time for apologies. “My flat is too far from both the hospital and from my office. Would you mind terribly if I stayed here for a while? I’ll put up the rent until you find something new.”

“I’m done looking for work,” he replied tetchily. “I’m much better suited to a life of crime.”

“You haven’t the temperament for it, love. Not in the long-term.”

“What do you know about the proper temperament for crime?”

“More than you would know.” She nudged his hip with her stiletto. “May I take that as a yes?”

For the record, Q knew plenty. He knew that Rio job had been deep cover and that her partner had blown it. He may not have seen Eve in years, but he’d never lost sight of her. If she wanted to keep her little secret, he’d play along.

“It’s a yes, but do try not to disturb me first thing in the morning,” Q said. “You won’t like it.”

*

That was almost a year ago.

Eve’s mum recovered and went back to New York, but neither Eve nor Q have brought up the idea of her moving out.

Her paperwork still lists Amanda’s apartment as her place of residence; she stops by twice a week to pick up the mail. Meanwhile, Amanda has turned Eve’s bedroom into a home office. Eames, whose name is still on the lease despite living in Mombasa, has people come by twice a week to pick up _his_ mail and water his plants, as though Q couldn’t do it himself.

No one at MI6 knows about their arrangement. Q has checked, and there are no records of their cohabitation anywhere—not in memos or emails or digitized files. They don’t know for certain if two MI6 employees living together is against the rules, but they don’t want to give anyone reason to prohibit it ex post facto.

Their desks are located at opposite ends of the underground complex. Mallory and the double-Os keep her as busy as Q’s department keeps him.

However, no matter how busy she is, Eve finds reasons to wander by his area a couple of times a day, though she never talks to him when anyone else is around.

Adjit, who monitors chatter in China, is convinced that Eve fancies _him_.

“Why else is she always here?” he asks. “It can’t possibly be for you.”

“Why not?” Q asks.

“You? And a bird like that?”

Q purses already pursed lips. “You do realize I’m your superior, don’t you?”

“Well, she never talks to you. Do you think I should ask her for a drink?”

Instead of answering, Q pretends to be called in to save the world, yet again.

Later, he creates a fake profile for Adjit, complete with some manipulated old karaoke footage he’s unearthed, as a sad, sad reject from a _Britain’s Got Talent_ audition. He pretends to be surprised when it begins to circulate around the office with the viral speed usually reserved for K-Pop.

Adjit will be too embarrassed to ever speak to Eve again.

“That was mean, even for you,” she whispers later, when she drops by again. Q is the last one in the office, and they have the vault to themselves.

“I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

“What on earth could poor Adjit have done to warrant such a punishment?”

“That’s classified.”

“Of course it is.” Eve is the only person Q has ever met who can smirk with her entire face, not just her mouth. “Anyway, poor thing. The girls over in Translation say someone should take him out for a drink to cheer him up. They volunteered me. I’m to take him to the Wollesley tomorrow.”

Hours later, when he’s packing up to head home, feeling defeated and deflated, he opens the drawer in which he keeps his scarf. Inside are two packs of HobNobs that weren't there before.

* * *

**Secret #2: Eve and Q met in high school**

Few things in this world are as exasperating as a group of public school boys on a class trip abroad.

Q and his mates had pre-planned their precious three hours of free time in Prague with the meticulous enthusiasm of the truly pathetic. It took only ten minutes for them to become horribly lost. But even the most repeated of wrong turns in Prague leaves one in a beautiful spot. Q urged them to cut their losses and settle into the inviting café before them.

“Perhaps they’ll let us have alcohol,” Cyril had said. “We look sixteen, don’t we?”

(They were fourteen. And all over spots.)

Of course, only Anthony had the courage to order anything stronger than espresso. Q broke the mould by combining his with ice cream to make an affogato. 

He saw her on his way back from the loos. She sat at the center of a gaggle of teenage girls—as chic and effortless as he and his mates were rumpled and hopeless. Unlike Q and his friends, they wore no uniform, unless one counted the mandatory black Zara slacks, tastefully low-cut top and artfully arranged scarf that all the Continental girls seemed to wear. She swirled her straw around the edges of her sundae glass as she talked; it was a mannerism she would never outgrow. 

Eve assessed him with a quietly watchful upturned face as he walked by. The other girls tittered and pointed, nudging her to say something.

She startled Q by speaking English. With the boldness of an American but the accent of a Londoner, she said, “My friends would like to sit with you.”

Q was the hero of the hour for joining the two groups. His friends couldn’t believe their luck. The girls seemed to have already decided the matches, and sat next to their designated boys. Q found himself next to Eve, whether by design or leftovers, he didn’t know, though probably the former. His particular brand of looks—floppy hair, sardonic smile and piercing profile—served him better as a teenage boy then than they do now, and it only made sense that the prettiest girl of the bunch had chosen him.

“Tell me about England,” she demanded with a surprising undercurrent of desperation. “Tell me anything.”

Eve, he learned, was a foreign service brat. Prague was her diplomat father’s third post in five years. This was her third school. She was at home everywhere and nowhere. 

“If I had to guess, I’d say you missed La Patrie,” Q quipped.

“I do love Paris, but I miss London, too,” she replied, upending his statement with more literalness than he’d expected. “Even more when I listen to how much people hate us sometimes.”

“Not much you can do about that except revel in your superiority.”

“Sure there is,” she replied. She leaned in close and whispered, “I’m going to be a spy when I grow up.”

“You don’t honestly think there are still spies? Or think they’ll exist in a few years. The internet, you see—” Q was about to launch into a proselytizing, prophetic description of the future that had already become his favorite soap box, but she interrupted him.

“Did you ever watch _Charlie’s Angels_?” she asked.

“When I was little. Rubbish program.”

“Well, I want to be Charlie.”

The allotted time flew by faster than they realized. In the end, it was Eve—already handling them the way she would one day handle agents twice her size and age—who reminded them of the time. Even if there had been a prayer of seeing these girls again, none of the boys had the pluck to ask for their numbers. They mumbled their goodbyes and took off at a run across the Charles Bridge. 

Q realized his wallet was not in his pocket only a few blocks from the café. He could have easily gone back to get it. The others wouldn’t have minded. He opened his mouth to tell them, but then shut it again with a clack of teeth. 

As a wallet, it contained only a hundred krona and a few library cards. Enough to convey his name and address, but nothing he would miss. His important belongings were all back at the hotel.

As a romantic object, however, it brimmed with potential.

By the time he returned home, a package had arrived. Inside was a postcard taped to the wallet.

_If I didn’t know better, I’d say you left it on purpose._  
Actually, perhaps I do.  
When I next see you, you’ll buy me an affogato to pay me back for the shipping.  
We’ll keep in touch,  
Eve

*

The postcards arrived, not so much on the regular as on the irregular, for years.

Cryptic messages, sweet missives, pictures of elephants, ironic fantasias. Signed with the same handwriting but different names—Antoinette, Yolanda, Stephanie, Esther, Yvette, Briggite, and, most hilariously, Lucrezia—and always with a return address printed in miniature in the bottom left corner.

Q responded, not with pictures, but with packages. Painstakingly hand-written epistles accompanied neatly printed quotations from books he’d been reading, amateur photographs, stubs from sights he visited around England. Boy’s stuff in retrospect, but at the time he thought himself remarkably philosophical.

His mother asked who all these girls were. Q enjoyed the implication that he was a lady-killer and never disabused her of her assumptions. He took the postcards to school and pasted them on the inside of his locker. 

She took the train to meet him on subsequent school trips, finding ways for him to sneak away from the group for a coffee, and later—more daringly—a drink. She even dropped in on his dorm at Cambridge one day. Literally dropped in, through the skylight. Or so his roommate said. By the time Q had returned from class, she was gone, Eames had stars in his eyes, and a postcard sat on the desk.

She was his most constant analog-only relationship. His beautiful, dangerous secret.

*

These days the secrets are much more dangerous, but much less beautiful.

Q supposes it balances out. 

These days, he manufactures Eve’s pseudonyms. Setting up convincing background stories for the agents falls within his department’s purview. Especially when it comes to her, he performs the task with an imaginative flair that Procurement has told him his predecessors lacked. 

He crafts beautiful identities for her. In a sense, she’s already created them herself, though she’s probably forgotten by now. For each country she visits, Q pulls out one of the old postcards he still keeps in an empty wine glass box in the kitchen. He brings Antoinette, Yolanda, Stephanie, Esther, Yvette, Brigitte and Lucrezia to life, and lets Eve step into the roles.

No, she hasn’t forgotten, because every time she’s gone—and sometimes days after she’s returned—he receives the same postcard she sent when she was last in that city. He wonders how much time she spends hunting them down, or if perhaps she always knew they would end up here, and purchased multiples years ago.

*

“What are these?” Craig from Accounts asks in the locker room after their mandatory shooting range practice.

They may be adults now, but Q still hangs his postcards in his locker.

“They’re from some girls I met a long time ago,” he replies.

* * *

**Secret #3: Eve got Q the job at MI6**

“I have a proposition for you,” Eve said one Saturday morning.

It was the first thing she’d said in a normal tone of voice in almost a week. 

Before leaving on her most recent work trip, she’d said she was headed to Dubai. Q had long known that she was almost never where she said she was, but this time he’d discovered the true destination in her coat pocket while innocently rooting around for loose coins. Eve was usually very discreet and organized, but she’d come home from this most recent trip different. She was hardly quiet or morose or brooding… quite the contrary. Few would have been able to tell anything at all was wrong, but Q detected a sharpness to her sarcasm and a hardness to her digs—a sense of performance at odds with her usual naturalness.

Q had tried everything he could think of to snap her out of the funk she refused to acknowledge. He’d burnt her some _pain perdu_ , forged them tickets to a West End play starring her precious Ewan McGregor, read aloud bits of Wodehouse, even offered (shudders) to accompany her to spin class. But nothing had worked to rub the edge off her disturbingly false chipperness. 

“What sort of proposition?” he asked warily.

“I heard of a hacking competition. There’s prize money. You’d be a shoo-in.”

“I don’t enter competitions.”

“Oh, don’t be such a snob. And it isn’t as though you’ve got anything else to do. It’s been months and you’ve neither looked for a new job nor succumbed to a life of crime. I’m sick of seeing you in your pajamas.”

“They’re wonderful pajamas.”

“They’re heliotrope. They look like something my grandfather probably wore.”

“As I said. Wonderful. So, what’s this contest about?”

She explained something about the goal being buried beneath layers of encrypted code in what ‘was made to look like’ Venezuelan government servers. It sounded almost pathetically easy to Q, not worth his time. 

“Just think about it,” she said.

She proceeded to spend the rest of the day tidying her things to the point where they almost disappeared. When asked what she was doing, she absently replied that she had been hit with a spring cleaning bug. 

But then he’d come back from a run out for San Pellegrino and Stilton to find her in the foyer with the same four suitcases she’d arrived with months before. 

“Eve,” he asked tentatively. “Are you going somewhere?”

“I’ve been given a week’s vacation. I’m off to an inn in the Cotswold’s for some R&R.”

“With all your belongings?” he asked skeptically.

“I’ll see you in a week, yeah?”

And like a dream, she blew out, leaving no trace that she’d ever been there. Q sat down in the middle of the living room rug, just where he’d been when she’d first blown in. He tried not to pout. The attempt proved a dismal failure.

The next day, for lack of anything better to do, he decided to play her little scavenger hunt. He guessed it had something to do with her work. Perhaps a case no one on the inside could crack. It was as easy as she'd promised, a bit of a lark, really.

Twenty minutes later, the door blew off the hinges and armed agents stormed inside. Q raised his hands to eye level (no need to be _too_ deferential).

“May I help you?” he asked.

The agents were too busy searching every corner of the apartment to have time for humour.

“Is anyone else here?” one asked with a gun to Q’s ribs.

“I’m quite alone.”

“You live alone?”

“My roommate comes and goes,” he replied, quite truthfully.

They handcuffed him, trundled him into a van and drove him to an underground facility that he would later get to know quite well. He rode silently, not quite wondering what was going on, but not having an entirely firm grasp either. He knew Eve must have set him up. That knowledge was enough to give him confidence that whatever was going on couldn’t be _too_ perilous. 

They sat him at a long table in a dimly lit room with his hands bound behind his back. 

When he saw Eve again, he promised himself, he’d scold her for having put him in such an undignified position.

“She’ll be in to see you soon,” the last of the agents said before they left him alone.

“A bit cliché, isn’t it?” he asked. “The van, the helmets, the sad, winking light bulb without a proper fixture? The mysterious ‘she’?”

They were too dull to reply.

He wasn’t sure who he expected to walk through the door a few minutes later. The most dramatic answer would have been Eve herself, but instead he got a petite elderly woman. 

“You’re either in luck,” she said crisply, “or very deep in the soup. Let’s find out which, shall we?”

*

As soon as they strapped him to the polygraph machine, Q understood why Eve planned it like this.

He couldn’t fail, and he didn’t have to lie, because he didn’t actually know anything. And they didn’t know what to ask.

*

After months of getting by on mild criminal activity, Q finally traded his doomed start-up for an associate director position with Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

The cafeteria was rubbish compared to his last office, but the corporate discount program was nothing to sneeze at.

When next Q set eyes on Eve, a week later, it was by the vending machine. She had her arm up the inside of the thing, reaching desperately for a bag of M&Ms that dangled halfway out of its socket.

“Let me.” He looked around it for the machine’s product label, and then used the purchasing keyboard to type in an override code that unlocked the door. With a flourish, he swung it open and offered her a choice of M&Ms, crisps and Toblerone.

She took them all.

“You’re new here.” Her eyes were noncommittal, but they still danced. They danced up to a corner of the hallway, alerting him to a camera watching them. “How do you like it so far?”

“Well, it’s gotten me out of my pajamas.”

“That _was_ the intent.”

“Not my intent, though.”

“No, not yours.” A hint of a smile played across her lips.

“What department do you report to?” he asked, just to see what she’d say. 

“I’m in a bit of a transitory period right now. I killed an agent, you see,” she said, that false cheer back in her voice for a moment. “A bit of a suspension is usually in order after that happens. Some time off and then a break from active field duty.”

Q already knew. On his fourth day, he’d broken into the email system and looked up her file. He’d read all about the fabled 007 and Istanbul and the impossible shot she’d been ordered to take. 

“I doubt this will set you back much. Will I see you around?” He wasn’t talking about the office.

“I always turn up.”

When he got home that night, the apartment was empty but all her belongings were back in place. Amongst the catalogues and bills he picked up in the mail, he found a postcard from the Cotswold’s.

_There’s something at Mayberry I’ve been coveting but_  
unable to afford while paying the whole rent.  
Plus, someone’s got to keep an eye on you during the day.  
You were getting too skinny.  
xoxo 

They’d been playing their little games for years, but Q knew enough to tell that this was the only way she could tell him what was wrong.

*

During the explosion, Q surprised even himself by being the only one to keep a clear head. He shored up the firewalls, tracked the coordinates of the detonator, and ensured that MI6 remained as solid and defiant as the china bulldog on M’s desk.

Shaken and tired, the old Q asked for an early retirement. Within a week, rumour had it he was opening a seaside hotel in Torquay.

Odd.

Although he’d barely passed his two-month mark, Q was promoted to, well, Q.

“Don’t let it go to your head,” Eve said when she got home that night.

“Too late.”

He counted to three in his head, and on cue, she squealed girlishly. 

“What’s this?” she asked, popping her head back through his bedroom door. In her hand was the Mayberry leather tote he’d found repeat visits to in her search history.

“Munitions. I’ve upgraded it with a GPS tracker and a camera in the clasp.”

*

“Should we get a larger flat?” she asks when it’s all over—Silva, Skyfall, the funeral. They’re curled up under a cashmere afghan, drinking red wine and playing Chinese Checkers. “Now that you’re making more and I’ll no longer be out in the field.”

“I quite like it here. And what do you mean ‘we’? You live with Amanda, remember?”

“And you still live with Eames. What of it?”

“You’re making more yourself,” Q notes.

“How do you know that?”

“Anyone who thinks M would have suspended you for missing that shot is an idiot. She made hard choices but she was never needlessly unfair. I know what codename ‘Moneypenny’ means. You’re being groomed.”

She smiles as she finishes a triple-jump move into his home base. “I told you one day I’d be Charlie.”

“I never doubted it.”

* * *

**Secret #4: Q has been desperately in love with Eve for as long as he can remember**

Q isn’t nearly as shy and unassuming as some strangers might assume. He’s never had trouble talking to women or making his interest known. The few he has deigned to approach have usually responded favorably.

But with Eve, everything’s been cocked up for years. At every juncture, he’s formulated a plan, a speech, an outing, a gesture. And at every juncture, it’s somehow gotten away from him. And now here he is, fourteen years later—as long as he lived before meeting her—stranded in quicksand. She’s seen him half-asleep and drooling, he’s picked up the tampons on her shopping list. They’ve somehow become a happily married couple without any of the sexy bits. Q can’t tell where he went wrong.

“Must I pull _all_ your triggers for you?”

Like the zombies in the impossible-to-beat game that Q has recently beaten, Bond keeps coming back. Back to life, back to MI6, back with apparently nothing to do except needle Q. He’s jogged up behind him on Q’s walk to the Tube.

“What on earth are you talking about, 007?” 

“Like any worthwhile target, women require a bit more hands-on finesse. More decisive, physical action. In my experience, they can’t be diffused whilst typing in your pajamas and drinking tea.”

Ever since watching Eve leave with Adjit for their drink at the Wollesley, Q has sat under a personal, invisible raincloud. Bond speaking in riddles is the last thing he needs.

“I really haven’t the time for—” 

“You’re overthinking it,” Bond interrupts.

“Overthinking what?”

“My would-be killer. Just go home and get it done, Q. Quit faffing about.”

“How did you…” Q thought he’d sealed off every file, every record of…

“I saw you two out running errands last weekend.” Bond smiles. It’s more frightening than his grimaces. “Eyes. You may have heard of them. They’re the latest in surveillance equipment.” When he sees Q open his mouth to protest, he adds, “Don’t worry. I wasn’t following you and I haven’t told anyone. You’re life isn’t _that_ thrilling.”

Now that it’s out there, Q supposes it would be difficult to feel any more mortified than he already does, so he asks, “And why do you think I should… pull the trigger? Why makes you think it would work?”

“I’ve been watching the two of you dance around each other for months. I always know. You’ll be in a much better mood once you get it over with,” Bond continues with a smirk. “Perhaps a good enough mood to finally finish the upgrades to the gun I requested over a month ago.”

“Is this your way of guaranteeing results, 007?”

“I enjoy diffusing bombs both inside and outside the workplace. And this one's been ticking for some time, I imagine.”

Q’s raised eyebrow mirrors Bond’s. 

“My preferred weapon,” Bond continues, “is usually a bottle of Bollinger and a hot shower. But for this one, I’d recommend something a little more dangerous. Ask her to cut your hair. She’s quite talented at that sort of thing. And you could use it.”

Q pats his carefully arranged mop protectively.

Bond stops at the end of the block. “This is where we part ways,” he says. “I’ll expect a mission report on Monday.”

He’s dashed into a taxi before Q has a chance to open his mouth.

*

“What’s all this?” Eve asks when she comes home and sees a bottle of Bollinger on the dining table.

She’s got a matching one in her hand.

“Bond advised me to ask you to cut my hair.”

“So you bought a bottle of bubbly for the occasion?”

He nods at her bottle. “What’s that for?”

“Bond told me to give you a shave.”

They look at each other and the bottles. And then back again. Invisible lights replace the rainclouds.

Q scrambles to his feet and she shoves him against the wall. Spindly arms and go wheeling and lips almost miss their targets, but it doesn’t take long for them to settle into the kind of comfortable rhythm they’ve always found.

“If you didn’t do something soon, I was going to have to club you and drag you off to Paris for the weekend, caveman-style,” Eve says hours later when they find themselves yet again under the afghan and playing Chinese Checkers—only this time without any clothes on.

“You sent out none of the usual signals. How was I to know?”

“Darling, I’ve followed you around for half my life. I got you a job so we could spend all day together. I bloody _moved in_ with you. I’m not sure how much clearer I could make it.”

“I suppose when you put it that way.”

“You really aren’t half so clever as you think you are.”

“Bond said I was overthinking. Which means I’m actually cleverer.”

“You know what this means, don’t you?” she says in horror. “We owe 007 a favor.”

The weight of the situation settles around him. “How ghastly.”

“I could shoot him again,” she offers helpfully.

“That would be lovely.”


End file.
